Posts Tagged 'Popularity'

As an amateur filmmaker, I strive to get my footage seen by as many people as possible. Shameless plug time - http://vimeo.com/14159857 . Most of the time, it is only 1 or 2 people per week but when a guy sells $50,000 for $200 people want to watch! Have you clicked the link yet?. My normal traffic is usually handled by a virtual machine without issues. But what happens when you instantly become popular?

This happened to me this weekend. A newer video I posted last week became popular. It went from 85 plays on Friday, to 5,007 on Saturday, to 22,136 on Sunday. On Monday, I had an all time high of 62,397 plays on Monday. The average steamed video file size was 53MB. Some were bigger (actually viewing it in Full HD mode), and some were smaller (mobile versions that were streamed). Over these 4 days, 4.75TB of my video was transferred across the internet, with 70% of this done on Monday.

How do you survive such a burst in popularity? Good backend design, and having a provider which can scale quickly to offset these issues. Here at SoftLayer, we can spin up your custom cloud instance templates in just a few minutes to help relieve that sudden increase in traffic. Still not enough? How about using our CDN to move your content files closer to the end user? At SoftLayer, the sky is the limit on the possibilities of how we can help you survive instantly becoming popular.